The tragedy of war - literally - in this play

By Adam Warner

It took a very real tragedy to get a group of actors to confront a ruthless world.

In this case, the killing was of the brother of a member of the international troupe Needcompany — a journalist whose slaying in Kosovo is the driving force behind “The Deer House,” opening tomorrow at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“With his death, the war entered the company,” said Jan Lauwers, founder and artistic director of Needcompany. “It provided the starting point for a play about a group of theater-makers who are increasingly faced with the harsh reality of the world they travel around in.”

The immediacy of the tragic event gave Lauwers motivation to write the twofold piece, which is a mixture of fact and fairy tale.

The main story line, which takes place in a spare rehearsal space, is a tranche de vie of real events the company experienced. The other, set in a fairy-tale world in prehistoric Kosovo, focuses on a family of deer breeders that faces murder, anguish, and vengeance as a civil war closes in on them and a war photographer is forced to kill one of their own.

Underwear, rubber antlers, jumbo ears, group singing, bizarre primeval costumes, warped animal figurines, and nude bodies are all abundant as the two tales intertwine. Text, music, dance, and drama accompany these visuals to create a multilingual and multidisciplinary piece.

“The Deer House” is the third chapter in “Sad Face–Happy Face,” Needcompany’s theatrical trilogy on human nature. The overarching theme of the collection is mortal perseverance on a merciless planet. In 2004, Lauwers brought the first installment of the series, “Isabella’s Room,” to BAM’s Next Wave Festival. The death of Lauwers’s father was the inspiration for that play.

“The trilogy is an ode to humanity,” said Lauwers. “Wherever we live, we have one thing in common: we are survivors.”

“The Deer House” at BAM Harvey Theater [651 Fulton St. at Rockwell Place in Fort Greene, (718) 636-4100], Oct. 5, 7-9 at 7:30 pm. Tickets $25-$45. For info, visit www.bam.org.

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It's a 'Delusion'

By Adam Warner

“I’ve been asleep for 20 years,” says Laurie Anderson. “What have I been doing all that time?”

Anderson, the legendary experimental artist, seeks to capture the mysterious world of dreams in her mind-bending new show, “Delusion.”

Combining such diverse subjects as ghost ships, punctuation, Icelandic elves, dead relatives, the Swiss super collider, the decline of the American empire, the mystic who started the Russian space program, and her Swedish-Irish heritage, “Delusion” takes elements from throughout Anderson’s 30-year canon.

“Almost every artist could say that dreams are their inspiration,” said Anderson. “How does that affect then, as you’re cooking up these images at night, your waking self?”

Anderson accomplishes this mighty, multi-topic task by cutting “Delusion” into 20 short plays, and forcing viewers into an ethereal show where they never knows what is real and what is illusion.

“I’m trying to make a kind of trance-like situation with images and sounds, so that your mind can float and do the kind of jump cutting that this piece requires you to do,” Anderson said.

In “Delusion,” Anderson plays everything from jazz to folk with her electronically enhanced violin, which is accompanied by Tibetan temple horns, Arabic strings, and virtuoso musicians, not to mention Anderson’s crafty animation and film sequences projected on furniture. She also alternates between her own voice and that of a male alter ego, Fenway Bergamot (naturally).

It’s more hallucinogenic than dropping acid while listening to Iron Butterfly. But of course — it’s Laurie Anderson, an artist who has worked in the visual, musical, lyrical, photographic, electronics and oral spheres for three decades. On top of this, she’s invented several instruments and released various studio albums.

Her previous works are the stuff of cult fandom — “United States: Parts I-IV,” “Empty Places,” “The Nerve Bible,” and “Songs and Stories from Moby Dick” — but few artists can claim, as Anderson can, to have been an “artist in residence” for NASA. That role culminated in her piece, “The End of the Moon,” which had a two-week run at BAM in 2005.

Weird science, indeed.

Laurie Anderson’s “Delusions” at BAM Harvey Theater [651 Fulton St. at Rockwell Place in Fort Greene, (718) 636-4100]. Sept. 21-25; Sept. 28-30; Oct. 1-2 at 7:30 pm. Sept. 26 and Oct. 3 at 3pm. $20-$60. For info, visit www.bam.org.

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